Camp Bestival 2015 Pt. 1
Since Thursday I've been camping with my family at Camp Bestival 2015. It's been a fun packed weekend with lots of outdoor stuff, exercise, music, comedians and general fun. I'll write more about it when I've properly had time to recover, but here's a picture from the highlight of our weekend. A very intimate Dick and Dom (not) reading the Jungle Book. Other things we got up to over the weekend included Dick vs Dom go wild Steve Backshall Mister Tumble Marcus Brigstock Level 42 Underworld Clean Bandit John Halpern on cryptic crosswords (twice) Lulastic and the Scummy Mummies Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat National Trust 50 things meadow plus loads of sideshows, carnival parades and other diversions I also remembered a lot I'd forgotten about camping and also learnt a little bit about festivals. More on that…
Author Interview – Greg Smith
Greg Smith, author & graphic designer This interview is with Greg Smith, a graphic designer turned novelist who has written two quite different novels in different genres. Greg is an Australian who has spent most of his life living in the US, but not quite enough to stop him signing off G'Day. Here are Greg Smith's answers to my questions. How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I’ve been writing seriously for several years now albeit sporadically, but it’s been something in the back of my mind to try way long before that. And to answer your question as to what, or in my case who, made me start writing ... I can thank my wife for that. One day I mentioned an idea for a story and she quipped, “That would make a…
Autonomous Vehicles pt.2
Social Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles Perhaps Autonomous mobile homes will cruise round here: Catford Road (South Circular Road), London SE6 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) My previous article on Self Driving Cars covered some of the technical points, that self driving cars are starting to look safer than human drivers and that there are traffic management benefits to most vehicles being self-driving. But there's more to it than that. For a start there will be more than just 'cars' that drive themselves around, so properly one ought to talk about autonomous vehicles (AV). No More Professional Drivers The most obvious consequence of autonomous vehicles is that those who drive for a living will rapidly be out of a job. The cost base for taxis, truck haulage and bus companies involves driver pay plus the costs of the vehicle. I expect that initially there…
Editing Perfects
Over the last few weeks I've been editing Perfects for a second draft. I finished it over two years ago and it has sat in the metaphorical drawer waiting until I had time between uni courses to focus on it and apply what I learned from A215 to it. As a re-cap, Perfects is an evolution of Exodus, which was my multi-threaded NaNoWriMo 2012 story of a mid twenty first century exodus of people from Earth into space as space travel became an order of magnitude cheaper. I decided when I re-looked at it that there was an interesting world there, but that the strands needed loads of work to knit together. One of the strands became the novella Crisis Point, which I released in 2013. Perfects followed a group of genetically engineered teenagers and twentysomethings living mainly in Cambridge.…
Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /var/www/html/themself/wp-content/themes/mesocolumn/lib/functions/theme-functions.php on line 502
Book Review – Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Having already read Divergent and Insurgent I put Allegiant on pre order for when it came out in paperback. It arrived a few weeks ago along with The Annihilation Score. I'd intended to wait until I'd read some of the ARCs I'd been sent before reading Allegiant, however I couldn't quite resist knowing how the trilogy ended. The whole trilogy is like an onion, there are more layers beneath this one and it can make you cry. Mainly it made me cry because the world building looked poor, and then Roth revealed this as another layer which can only be peeled back when you spot its flaws. Spoilers If you haven't read the books then some of this review might spoil them. (more…)